


A Good Start

by bayloriffic



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-23
Updated: 2011-09-23
Packaged: 2017-10-23 23:42:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bayloriffic/pseuds/bayloriffic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three weeks after Arizona has a door slammed in her face, she runs into Callie in an elevator in the west wing of the hospital.</p><p>Picks up after "Adrift and at Peace" (7.10).</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Good Start

Three weeks after Arizona has a door slammed in her face, she runs into Callie in an elevator in the west wing of the hospital. She’s just spent the past two hours doing an unsuccessful tumor removal on the heart of a three-month-old and she’s on her way to the fourth floor to perform a tracheotomy on a six-year-old girl.

“Two for the Road,” Callie says, jumping in the elevator and punching the button for the E.R.

“I’m sorry?” The elevator starts moving and Arizona focuses hard on the flashing numbers telling her what floor she’s on. She hasn’t spoken to Callie since she poured her heart out and Callie literally shut the door on her feelings and she’s just not in the frame of mind to deal with this right now, stuck in an elevator, possibly on her way to miserably failing to help another kid.

“Audrey Hepburn?” Callie says, apparently oblivious to Arizona’s inner turmoil. “Albert Finney?”

“Okay?”

“ _Two for the Road._ The movie?” The elevator door opens there’s a frantic-looking nurse there, reaching in to hand Arizona her patient’s chart. She steps off the elevator and Callie reaches out to hold the doors open. “Want to come over and watch it with me tomorrow?”

Arizona just stands there. She can feel herself just kind of gawking, and Callie’s face closes off completely.

“Never mind,” Callie says. “Forget it.”

“Wait! No. No. I mean, yes. Yes.” She takes a breath, clutching the chart of the little girl whose life she’s hopefully going to be saving in just a few seconds. “Tomorrow sounds good.”

**

Okay, so it turns out that _Two for the Road_? Is really depressing. _Really_ depressing. It’s all fighting and cheating and just two hours of complete and utter misery. There’s a pseudo-happy ending, but it’s not fooling Arizona.

“Why did you want to watch that?” she asks Callie once it’s over and the credits start rolling. She and Callie have spent the entire night in silence, sitting on opposite ends of Callie’s horribly uncomfortable edgy couch, a bowl of popcorn perched precariously between them.

“I don’t know,” Callie says. “I thought it was going to be sweet.”

“Oh yeah,” Arizona says. “It was adorable. My favorite part was when Albert Finney cheated on Audrey Hepburn. Oh! Or when Audrey cheated on Albert. That was the sweetest.”

“Okay, I get it. The movie sucked. I am the worst at picking movies.” Callie throws her hands up in surrender and stalks over to the TV, stabbing the eject button on the DVD player way harder than necessary. “You can pick the movie next week.”

“Next week?” Arizona asks, kind of hating herself for how hopeful she sounds. “There’s going to be a next week?”

Callie just kind of stares at her and Arizona wants to ask her what’s going on, what they’re doing, if they're just friends or if they're something else, but she also doesn’t want to screw anything up right now. And Callie’s looking at her like she might bolt if Arizona makes a wrong move, so she just smiles brightly and grabs a handful of popcorn from the still-full bowl.

“Okay,” she says, slowly chewing the stale popcorn. It’s gross but it at least gives her something to do that isn’t babbling about how much she’s still in love with Callie. “But you can’t make fun of my choice.”

“You just made fun of my choice!”

“No, I said it was depressing. I did not make fun.”

Callie narrows her eyes and cocks her head in that way she has when she’s not buying it, so Arizona tries to cover as best she can. “I mean, I didn’t love it, but it was…very well-acted.”

Callie laughs—a real laugh the kind where her whole face seems to light up. “Okay, well, if you choose something ‘well-acted’ then I promise not to mock it either.”

**

Arizona spends the whole week trying to figure out what movie to bring to Callie’s on Friday night.

What she really needs in the perfect movie to show Callie how she feels, but also something that’s not too perfect, because she doesn’t want to look pathetic. They're trying out the whole "let's-be-friends" thing that Arizona has never been good at, but for Callie she's more than willing to give it a shot. So she doesn’t want anything too cheesy or romantic, but she also doesn’t want to show up with, like, _Die Hard 2_ or something.

Teddy suggests _Out of Africa_ and Arizona almost slaps her.

Finally, she decides on _Casablanca_ , which is a total cliché, she knows. But she also knows that Callie’s never seen it and it’s a classic and it's about the tragedy of lost loves and the start of beautiful friendships, so Arizona thinks it’s as close as she’s going to get to perfect-not-pathetic.

**

Friday night rolls around and Arizona gets Karev to cover the last part of her shift so she can get home in enough time to shower and find something sexy-yet-casual to wear and eat a light dinner just in case Callie wants to do the popcorn thing again.

She’s on her way out the door when her cell phone rings and she fumbles opening it while she grabs the movie and tries to find her apartment key. She’s got the key in the lock when Callie cancels on her.

Apparently, Callie’s got other plans. She’s really sorry, of course, but she met someone a few days ago and it’s her only night off and she would have told her sooner, but it was kind of a last minute thing and she really is sorry and Arizona understands, right?

**

Arizona spends the whole night cleaning her apartment, scrubbing it from top to bottom.

She didn’t have much time to find a place when she got back, so she ended up just signing a lease on the first thing she could afford within walking distance of the hospital. It’s a tiny little nothing apartment in a three-story brick walk-up full of old people on pensions and young newlyweds and sad middle-aged career types. Of which she’s apparently one. All of the walls are white—white-white, not off-white, or seafoam-white, or robin’s egg blue-white—and painting takes way more energy than she has these days, so they're going to stay that way.

She still hasn’t really unpacked, so cleaning is kind of a weird experience, but she starts with her bedroom and then the living room and then the kitchen, until she finally makes her way to the bathroom. She hates cleaning the bathroom; it’s by far the worst room in the house. Even so, she spends almost an hour in there, probably because she’s got some kind of masochistic need to spend her night being as miserable as possible. So she mops the floors and scrubs the toilet, and wipes down the shower tiles with so much Clorox her eyes start to water and her nose stings.

By the time she’s finished, her face is covered in tears and snot and she can almost pretend it’s because of the bleach and not because she’s been sobbing her eyes out.

It’s barely even ten o’clock by the time she’s finished cleaning and in bed and she tries not to think about Callie and what she’s doing and who she’s with but it just—it sucks, is the thing.

So she just lays in bed and tries to sleep, but her hands still smell like bleach and her stupid new apartment is too hot and stuffy and no matter how much she tosses and turns she just can’t get comfortable.

After an hour, she finally gives up on sleep. She reaches over to her nightstand until she finds her remote and turns on the TV, flipping around through infomercials and home improvement shows and something that looks like an octopus fighting a great white shark, until she finds _Pretty Woman_ , which, embarrassingly enough, is her all-time favorite movie. Whatever, it’s better than fucking _Casablanca_ and its stupid not-happy, being-friends-is-so-great ending.

Back before Arizona turned into a lame ex-girlfriend cliché, Callie used to mock her relentlessly about her predilection for romantic comedies and Julia Roberts movies. But now there’s no one here to judge her for lying in bed in her bleach-stained sweatpants and ratty old hoodie and watching terrible romantic comedies and crying about how she completely ruined her life by breaking her ex-girlfriend’s heart, so. That’s exactly what she’s going to do, thank you very much.

The movie’s just starting—Julia hasn’t even met Richard Gere yet—so Arizona makes a quick run to the kitchen for a glass of wine. She ends up just bringing the whole bottle back to her bedroom, since it’s not good to leave opened wine just sitting in the fridge and anyway she’s thirsty from all the cleaning she’s done.

She’s halfway through the movie and the bottle of wine when her phone starts buzzing and she reaches out to grab it without even looking at the display. There’s not really any point since no one but the hospital or Teddy ever calls her these days. She probably shouldn’t even answer at all since if it’s the hospital, she’s in no shape to actually go in if they need her, and if it’s Teddy, she’ll just spend the next twenty minutes crying about Callie, but when the phone rings, she answers. Some kind of ingrained doctor-reflex, she guesses.

Hopefully, if it’s the hospital, they’ll just think she’s sick or was sleeping or something. If there’s an upside to crying and getting depressingly drunk alone in bed on a Friday night while your ex-girlfriend has sex with some hot young field hockey player or whatever, it’s that if the hospital calls, you can just say you’re sick and they’ll probably believe you. And if it’s Teddy, she doesn’t have to worry about what she sounds like, so. Whatever.

“Hello?” Arizona winces a little at how rough her voice is. God, she hopes it’s Teddy and not some sick tiny-human emergency. She's really not in the mood to deal with whatever innocent child is going to die tragically tonight.

“Hey.” And, oh god, it’s Callie. Which is even worse than the hospital because she’ll for sure know that Arizona’s voice is scratchy because she’s been crying and not because of allergies or whatever. Ugh, stupid Callie and her stupid knowing everything. Arizona’s never going to date anyone again.

“Calliope,” she says, trying to sound totally casual and sober, but probably failing miserably. “Hey. Hi. What’s up?” God, Callie can probably tell right away that Arizona’s spent the night wallowing in self-pity and watching terrible movies about prostitutes. This is so embarrassing. Arizona hates her life.

“Uh, nothing.” Callie’s quiet for a minute and Arizona reaches down to mute the TV, spilling half of her glass of wine all over herself, her bed, and the remote in the process.

“Shit,” she says. “Shit, shit, _shit._ ” The wine is everywhere, soaking into her hoodie and her brand new, super-expensive down comforter and dripping down onto the remote.

“Everything okay?” Callie asks. “Do you need me to let you go?”

“No,” she says quickly, giving up and just wiping the remote on the comforter. She’s going to have to get it cleaned anyway, so it might as well take one for the team. “No, I’m good. I just, I spilled some wine.”

“Wine, huh?” Callie says, sounding amused. “Wild night?”

“Oh yeah.” Arizona laughs wryly. “Me, a bottle of wine, and a bad movie. It’s crazy up in the Robbins household tonight.”

There’s a few beats of awkward silence and it takes everything in Arizona not to ask her about her night. About her date. About why she’s home before midnight, calling her ex-girlfriend and making her spill wine all over the place. About, well. About a lot of things.

“So what bad movie are you watching?” Callie says eventually and Arizona feels a little bit like she’s won some kind of bizarre, undefined battle.

She takes a sip of wine and a couple of seconds to celebrate her victory of silence. “Turn your TV to channel 12.”

Callie’s quiet for a minute and then Arizona hears her laugh. “Oh my god, Arizona. I can’t believe you’re watching this movie again.”

“Shut up!” Arizona laughs. “It’s good.”

“It’s terrible,” Callie says. But she doesn’t even start on her rant about how no hookers actually look like Julia Roberts and how this movie gives women unrealistic expectations about love until Arizona’s favorite part—the shopping spree—is over and Julia’s back at the hotel and sex scene starts.

They watch the movie together on the phone and Callie keeps making fun of it, but she always stops when the parts Arizona really likes come on. For her part, Arizona doesn’t say too much, just a few token protests when Callie’s rants start to get over the top.

By the time the movie’s over, it’s past midnight and Arizona’s fading. But then an _America’s Next Top Model_ marathon starts and Callie loves that show. She claims it’s only for ironic reasons, but Arizona kind of doubts that.

Besides, it’s the season with the girl with scabies, which is by far the best season so they both keep watching, and Arizona falls asleep listening to Callie complaining about Tyra’s sadistic need to humiliate and control the girls.

**

The next week in the hospital passes in a blur. Arizona’s got two different kids with leukemia and both of them go downhill within a day of each other, so she spends most of her time planning O.R. visits and comforting devastated parents and wondering why the hell she left Africa.

It’s exhausting and, by the time her day off rolls around on Saturday, all she wants to do is sleep for the rest of her life.

But she still hasn’t unpacked most of her stuff and there’s a whole corner of her living room that’s floor-to-ceiling cardboard boxes. Most of them are medical textbooks that Arizona hasn’t looked at in years and, if she’s being honest, she doesn’t want to look at now, but she’s going to have act like a grown-up and unpack some time and it’s rare that she has an entire weekend off, so.

She makes it through one-and-a-half boxes before she randomly finds an old issue of _Cosmo_ from 2006 that includes a quiz called “Are You Obsessed With Your Ex?” So she sits down in the middle of the floor with a complimentary Seattle Grace ballpoint pen and, after answering a series of completely inane questions, she finds out she’s a Better-off-without-him-Babe. Gross.

She takes it again and picks different answers and still gets the same results.

Ugh, she hates _Cosmo._ It’s so heteronormative and ridiculous and it doesn’t even know anything about her and Callie anyway. God, why do women even read this? Why did she even buy it in the first place? What the hell is wrong with her?

She knows that what she should really do is throw away the magazine and get back to unpacking, but instead she ends up sitting on her shiny hardwood floor with a giant glass of red wine and that same stupid magazine. She learns that there are 75 sex positions to drive her lover wild (and that only 32 of these apply to her and Callie) and that, apparently, with her coloring, she should be wearing more metallics. Maybe on Monday she’ll throw some gold lamé leggings on under her scrubs and land herself a sex partner with a penis.

She’s staring at the wall and wondering where she can get gold lamé in Seattle—not that it should be too hard since there’s got to be an American Apparel on every corner of this stupid, rainy hipster town, after all—and whether or not Avery is into neurotic blonde lesbians, when there’s a knock on her door.

Arizona throws the magazine into the nearest box, stashing it underneath her outdated copy of _Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics_ , and walks over to the door.

When she opens it, it’s Callie and she’s standing there in a wrinkled pair of scrubs and her sexy new haircut and Arizona really has no idea what to say to her right now.

Callie’s not quite so dumbstruck. “Hey.”

“Hi,” Arizona finally manages. It’s just that she’s a little drunk from the wine and the _Cosmo_ advice and it’s kind of hard for her to process all of this right now, is all.

“So this is your new place, huh?” Callie’s craning her neck to look inside and Arizona tries not to think about how pathetic the whole place must look, with its empty white walls and cheap particleboard bookshelves and cardboard boxes of medical textbooks everywhere.

“Yeah,” Arizona says, taking a step back and gesturing Callie inside. “This is it.” They both just stand there for a couple of minutes, looking around the room, and Arizona really does need to decorate at some point. Throw some pictures up on the walls or buy a ficus or a fern or…something to make it not so horribly depressing in here.

“It’s nice.”

“Thanks.” And, god, this is the most awkward conversation of her life. She really has no idea what to say, which is insane because she always has something to say, but she just wasn’t expecting this tonight and she keeps thinking about that stupid quiz and how much Callie would mock her if she told her about it. “Can I get you something to drink or, um, do you want to sit down or something?”

“No," Callie says, taking a step forward, closer to her. "I just..."

Arizona can smell the light, spicy sent of Callie’s perfume and there’s a speck of something that looks like dried blood right under Callie’s left ear, and it’s all she can do not to reach out and wipe it off.

“I just,” Callie says again, and then she’s taking a step even closer and she cups one hand against Arizona’s cheek and then she kisses her and all Arizona can think about is how much she has missed her. Because she has. She has missed her _so much._

So she kisses Callie back and she knows there’s a lot to talk about, that there’s so much that they both need to say, but right now all that she cares about is that Callie’s here and her body’s pressed up against hers and she smells amazing and she tastes so good, like she always has, and for the first time in weeks, Arizona feels like things might be okay after all.

**

end


End file.
